You’re listening to Burnt Toast! I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. Today, my conversation is with Lisa Sibbett, PhD.

Lisa writes The Auntie Bulletin, a weekly newsletter about kinship, chosen family and community care. As a long time Auntie herself, Lisa often focuses on the experiences of people without children who are nevertheless, in her words, "cultivating childful lives."

We’ve been talking a whole bunch about community on Burnt Toast lately, and Lisa reached out to have a conversation about the systems that get in the way of our community building efforts—specifically our culture's systemic isolation of the nuclear family. 

This is one of those conversations that isn't "classic Burnt Toast." But we're here to do fat liberation work—and so how we think about community matters here, because community is fundamental to any kind of advocacy work. Plus it brings us joy! And joy matters too. I super appreciate this conversation with Lisa, and I know you will too.

Today’s episode is free! But don't forget, if you were a Substack subscriber, you have until October 28 to claim your free access to our paid content. Check your email for your special gift link!

Episode 216 Transcript

Lisa

So my newsletter is about building kinship and community care. I live in cohousing, and I’ve been an auntie for many years to lots of different kids. I’ve always been really involved in the lives of other people’s children. And people who have lives like mine, we often don’t really have even language for describing what our experience is like. It’s sort of illegible to other people. Like, what’s your role? Why are you here?

And all of this has really blossomed into work that’s definitely about loving and supporting families and other people’s children, but I also write about elder care and building relationships with elders and building community and cohousing. And I have a chronic illness, so I sometimes write about balancing self-care and community care. 

Virginia

I have been an instant convert to your work, because a lot of what you write really challenges me in really useful ways. You have really made me reckon with how much I have been siloed in the structure of my life. 

It’s funny because I actually grew up with a kind of accidental–it wasn’t quite cohousing. We had two separate houses. But I was the child of a very amicable divorce, and my four parents co-parented pretty fluidly. So I grew up with adults who were not my biological parents playing really important roles in my life. 

And I have gotten to the point where I’m realizing I want a version of that for my kids. And that maybe that is just a better model. So it's fascinating to consider what that can look like when not everybody has those very specific circumstances.

Lisa

It’s a dreamy setup, actually, to have amicably divorced parents and extra parents.

Virginia

I’m super proud of all of my parents for making it work. My sister —who is my half sister from my dad’s second marriage—has a baby now. And my mom made the first birthday cake for them. There are a lot of beautiful things about blended families. When they work, they’re really amazing. 

And it always felt like we were doing something kind of weird, and other people didn’t quite understand our family. So I also relate to that piece of it. Because when you say "cohousing community," I think a lot of folks don’t really know what that term means. What does it look like, and how does it manifest in practice? What is daily life like in a cohousing community?

Lisa

There are different synonyms or near neighbor terms for cohousing. Another one is "intentional community." Back in the day, we might think about it as kind of a commune, although in the commune structure, people tended to actually pool their finances. I would say that cohousing is a much more kind of hybrid model between having your own space and being up in each other’s spaces and sharing all of the resources. 

So I really think of cohousing as coming frpm where so many dreamy social policies come from: Scandinavia. In Denmark and I think other countries in Northern Europe there is a lot of intentional urban planning around building shared, communal living spaces where there are things like community kitchens and shared outdoor space for lots of different residences. So that’s kind of the model that cohousing in the US tends to come from. And sometimes it’s people living together in a house. Sometimes it’s houses clustered together, or a shared apartment building. It can look a lot of different ways. The shared attribute is that you’re attempting to live in a more communal way and sharing a lot of your familial resources. 

In my cohousing community, there are just three households. It’s really, really small. We really lucked into it. My partner and I were displaced due to growth in our city, and needed to find a new place to live. And we had been talking with some friends for years about hoping to move into cohousing with them. But it’s very hard to actually make happen. It takes a lot of luck, especially in urban environments, but I think probably anywhere in the United States, because our policies and infrastructure are really not set up for it. 

So we were thinking about doing cohousing with our friends. They were going to build a backyard cottage. We were thinking about moving into the backyard cottage, but it was feeling a little bit too crowded. And then my partner was like, "Well, you know, the house next door is for sale." So it was really fortuitous, because the housing market was blowing up. Houses were being sold really, really fast, but there were some specific conditions around this particular house that made it possible for us to buy it. So we ended up buying a house next door to our friends. 

And then they also have a basement apartment and a backyard cottage. So there are people living in the basement apartment, and then, actually, the backyard cottage is an Airbnb right now, but it could potentially be expanded. 

So we have three households. One household has kids, two households don’t, and our backyard is completely merged. We eat meals together four nights a week or five nights a week. Typically, we take turns cooking for each other, and have these big communal meals, and which is just such a delight. And if your car breaks down, there’s always a car to borrow. We share all our garden tools, and we have sheds that we share. There are a lot of collective resources, and availability for rides to the airport ,and that kind of thing. 

Virginia

There are just so many practical applications! 

Lisa

It’s really delightful. Prior to moving into cohousing, we never hosted people at all. I was very averse to the idea of living in shared space. I was really worried about that. But because we have our own spaces and we have communal spaces, it sort of works for different people’s energies. 

And I certainly have become much more flexible and comfortable with having lots of people around. I’m no longer afraid of cooking for 12 people, you know? So it just makes it a lot easier to have a life where you can go in and out of your introversion phases and your social phases.

Virginia

I’m sure because you’re around each other all the time, there’s not the same sense of "putting on your outgoing personality." Like for introverts, when we socialize, there’s a bit of a putting on that persona.

Lisa

Totally. It’s much more like family. We’re kind of hanging around in our pajamas, and nobody’s cleaning their houses. 

Virginia

You have that comfort level, which is hard to replicate. It’s hard even for people who are good friends, but haven’t sort of intentionally said, "We want this in our relationship. "There are all those pressures that kick in to have your house look a certain way. This is something I’ve been writing about —how the hosting perfectionism expectations are really high. 

Lisa

Absolutely, yeah. And it’s just such an impairment for us to have to live that way.

Virginia

For me, it took getting divorced to reckon with wanting to make some changes. I mean, in a lot of ways, it was just necessary. There were no longer two adults in my household. The moving parts of my life were just more. I suddenly realized I needed support. But it was so hard to get over those initial hurdles. 

Almost every other friend I’ve had who’s gotten divorced since says the same thing. Like, wait, I’m going to ask people for a ride for my child? It’s this huge stumbling block when, actually, that should have been how we’re all parenting and living. But it really shows how much marriage really isolates us. Or, a lot of marriages really isolate us. Our beliefs about the nuclear family really isolate us and condition us to feel like we have to handle it all by ourselves.</st